#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Advertising became the city decoration: the first neon signs illuminated the facades and shop windows of the prospect – the Lama cafe, the Taimyr restaurant, the Norilsk hotel, the Lenin cinema.
In 1960, a fluorescent lamps manufacture workshop appeared in the city. The old glassblower master Siang-Shu-Chen and his two assistants – the master’s daughter Maya and Galina Chesnokova worked in it.
They made lamps of any shape: sticks, trapezoids, crescents. All of them were integral parts of letters and burned in different colors – red, blue, pink.
It was an innovative idea to decorate Norilsk restaurants and shops with gas discharge tubes burning in the dark – not a single city of the region, except Krasnoyarsk, had anything like that.
At about the same time, the Norilsk stores received their own names. Prior to that, grocery products had only a serial number, and manufactured goods were ingeniously called according to their assortment.
So one of the first shops to get a name in 1963 was the department store Talnakh, in 1964 the grocery store No. 1 was renamed into Yenisey and the fur products and hats shop was named Hantaika, the shoe store became Severyanka, the Children’s World became Severok. Those names illuminated Leninsky prospect in the darkness of the polar night.
In previous issues of the History spot photo project, we talked about the fact that Komsomolskaya square in Norilsk was the most cinematic – in the 1960s, three cinemas worked on the same square, and the Norilsk railway station was originally built for long-distance trains.
For other issues of our photo project about the history of the city and the combine, go to the History spot section.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
